I returned from the iConference a few days ago… after changing my flight to one earlier in the day, which I’m very glad I did, as others got stuck in Urbana-Champaign on account of the weather there. But that’s neither here nor there (so to speak). I’m writing this post to document some of my impressions and thoughts about, and to generally debrief from the conference. Up front, I need.. Read More

Inspired by KT’s excellent wordle image of her Pharmacy Librarian blog, I decided to create a wordle of — don’t ask me why — the session titles at the upcoming ASIST conference. Note that this is just session titles, not abstracts, and does not include the titles of pre-conference seminars, social events, governance, or the plenary sessions. I don’t know, do you think this conference might have something to do.. Read More

I want to start this by saying that this was completely Kathleen Kern‘s idea. We were talking over dinner at LIDA last week, and she asked me, essentially, “Why isn’t there an equivalent of WorldCat for digital libraries?” I gave some lame answer: no standardization across DLs, complexity of dealing with item- and collection-level description simultaneously, cost, I don’t even remember what all I said. (In my defense, we were.. Read More

I was on a panel earlier today at the LAUNC-CH Conference, which I think went well, though I killed the conversation at one point, never a good sign. Anyway, Abby Blachly of LibraryThing was the keynote speaker, and I had the good fortune to have some conversations with her during the conference, plus have lunch together. I’ve written here about LibraryThing before, and I fear that I came across as.. Read More

I’m at the ASIST conference now, and I had a realization yesterday. I attended the panel that Fred moderated, and by jove if it wasn’t the best session I’ve been to so far at this year’s conference. The research presented was interesting, the topics presented fit together in clear and logical ways, and the presenters were animated and enthusiastic, and had excellent presentation skills. I’ve been to other conference sessions.. Read More

How cool is this? Tefko emailed me recently to invite me to be a program co-chair of the 2008 Libraries in the Digital Age conference. Every year LIDA has two topics, and in 2008 the topics are “Reference in digital environment” and “Education and training for digital libraries.” Tefko invited me to be the chair for the Education topic, since I’ve been working on the DL Curriculum project. I’ve accepted.. Read More

Sitting now in the Supporting Education session at JCDL. Carl Lagoze is talking now, & giving some lessons learned from the NSDL experience. They all boil down to: This was a lot harder than we thought it would be, & People satisfice. Carl’s conclusion is that the NSDL was not a successful project. [Apparently I’m mistaken in writing this; see the comments below.] Chris Borgman says: “this is extremely depressing.. Read More

The word of the day here at JCDL is: mash-up. Or possibly mashup? (Thanks to Monica for this observation!) Jonathan Zittrain started it this morning in the plenary session, and I’ve heard at least 2 other people use it during their presentations, & I think I used it myself during mine. (Half the time I don’t know what comes out of my mouth during conference presentations, seriously.) Zittrain of course.. Read More

I’m at the JCDL conference this week — or more accurately, I’m working at the conference. Somehow I let myself get talked into being the Student Volunteers Chair. But enough about me. I actually managed to make the time in all of this chaos to sit in on most of the Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories panel session. About which Paul wrote some extensive and coherent comments, so I direct.. Read More

One year ago today Yvonne & I were in Croatia, for vacation & the LIDA conference. This year, Gary & I have sent Ron Brown to LIDA. Or I should say, Gary is sending Ron, in the sense that he’s paying for it. I just helped Gary select who gets to go. Ron will be going to Osijek first, & traveling with the conference organizers & students to Dubrovnik. I’m.. Read More